Teaching Indigenous teachers: Valuing diverse perspectives

In Australia, education is failing Indigenous people, who remain the most disadvantaged group in the nation (ABS, 2007; Doyle and Hill, 2008). Indigenous students' school participation rates are lower than their non-Indigenous peers, they leave school earlier and are less likely to complete secondary schooling (James and Devlin, 2005; Doyle and Hill, 2008). In Australia, Indigenous students are under-represented in universities and other tertiary education institutions. As a means to improve Indigeonous students' participation in schooling, there have been ongoing calls for many years in Canada, North America, New Zealand and Australia to increase the number of Indigenous teachers so that students can be taught by those who best understand their needs and cultural backgrounds (Locke, 2004; Reid, 2004; White et al., 2007). However, the number of Indigenous teacher staff as a proportion of all teaching staff in government schools has remained at less than 1% over the last 20 years.In the US, White et al. (2007) report on some of the factors that affect overall numbers of Hopi and Navajo people in teacher education. We suggest that similar issues are true in Australia, where universities struggle to provide the pastoral and academic support required to recruit and retain Indigenous students teachers (see Reid et al., 2009).We have drawn on post-structuralist theories of identity and subjectivity (Foucault, 1980; Henriques et al., 1984; Davies, 1993; Venn, 2006; Wetherell, 2008) to inform our work.